This workshop will respond to a pre-circulated chapter from Yopie Prins's Ladies' Greek: Translations of Tragedy. Forthcoming from Princeton University Press, this book is a literary and historical study about the entry of women into classical studies in Victorian England and America, focusing in particular on their translations of Greek tragedy. Why did they desire to learn ancient Greek, and how did they turn it into a language of and for desire? What was the appeal of a dead language, written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? Through various forms of literary transcription, transliteration, translation, and transformation, women of (Greek) letters became an important medium for classical transmission, mediating between the professionalization of classical philology and the popularization of classics, from the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.

Yopie Prins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

THIS IS A WORKSHOP OF A PRE-CIRCULATED PAPER. For NCF members, the paper will be available at least one week before the workshop in the Resources section of the NCF CTools site. You may also receive the paper as an email attachment by contacting Christie Allen at crisanne@umich.edu.

The Nineteenth-Century Forum is an interdisciplinary group for faculty and graduate students at the University of Michigan through the Rackham Graduate School. For more information on the Nineteenth-Century Forum, please see our website: www.umich.edu/~ncf/